Quotulatiousness

March 11, 2019

Recruiting and retention in the Canadian Forces

Filed under: Cancon, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Campbell briefly discusses a “new” plan to recruit (some) soldiers for special forces units directly from civilian life:

Lee Berthiaume, writing in the Globe and Mail, says that “The Canadian Forces are considering whether to recruit elite special-forces soldiers straight off the street rather than forcing them to follow the traditional route of first spending several years in the military … [and] … The idea, which is still being debated, comes as Canada’s special forces – and the military as a whole – look at radical new ways to attract and retain people with the skills and experience needed to fight tomorrow’s wars … [some insiders suggest] … That includes not just computer experts, for example, but also those with different ethnic and cultural backgrounds and language skills, as the special forces aim to operate more effectively in different parts of the world.“

First, I agree that “tomorrow’s wars” will may require some more people with scarce or special skills than we are likely to need in conventional or traditional military operations, but, despite the fact that a) I have been retired for almost a generation’s worth of years, and b) I was never in special forces, I am confident in saying that a special forces soldier is, first an foremost, a soldier and then, after much training, a special soldier.

Second, there is nothing new about recruiting special forces soldiers, right off the street, because they possess some special skills …

… but the men in the picture underwent horrendously difficult military training before they were ‘streamed’ into the special forces (Force 136) and sent to South East Asia to fight.

I take MGen Peter Dawe, Commander of the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command [at] his word when he says that “This is not about achieving set quotas or anything else … [and] … From a hard-operational perspective, do we have the right mix of people with the right sort of background, education, language, ethnicity, gender … that will allow us to do what our government expects us to do and will expect us to do in the future?” I believe that any focus on gender is politically inspired rubbish; I know that many women can do everything that many men can do, sometimes better ~ their gender is totally and completely irrelevant.

I also know, from discussion with serving members, that the Canadian Forces have an across the board recruiting and retention problem. The solutions to the recruiting and retention (both matter, equally) problems include

  • Better pay and allowance ~ that’s always a pretty obvious solution to part of the problem;
  • Separate pay for leadership (rank) and for skill (trade) ~ it has been over 50 years since Paul Hellyer screwed up the rank/trade system (especially the junior leadership ranks) in a (very welcome by all who, like me, were serving then) attempt to solve a remuneration problem. It’s well past time to revisit the whole pay and allowances system;
  • Newer and better equipment ~ who can blame young, hotshot fighter pilots for not wanting to fly 30+ years old, hand-me-down from Australia, jets? Who can blame sailors for being tired of constant sea duty in old warships? Who can blame soldiers for showing disdain for an Army that cannot even issue them proper boots or replace a World War II vintage pistol? and
  • Fight! This may seem counter-intuitive, but history and experience and academic studies all say that the best recruiting sergeant, better even than a pay raise and shiny new equipment, is the voice of guns. Now, I know this is exactly 180º out of phase with the current government’s policies and also goes against what many (most, I suspect) Canadians think their military ought to be all about, but neither the government nor many people really know or care much about he health of the military.

March 10, 2019

Irish Potato Famine – The American Wake – Extra History – #4

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Food, History, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published on 9 Mar 2019

Not all of the 214,000 Irish immigrants in 1847 made it safely to their new homes — and of those who did, many faced classism and xenophobia and even bullying from the “Ulster Irish” or “Scots-Irish” folks who had previously established themselves. In New York City specifically, the Five Points neighborhood became an infamous center of conflict — while local Irish-American John Joseph Hughes became instrumental in restoring Irish Catholicism.

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Canada’s “feminist” Prime Minister

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the Post Millennial, Ali Taghva recounts the apparently awkward interactions between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and outgoing Whitby MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau allegedly screamed at Liberal MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes when she originally informed him that she would not be seeking re-election this coming October.

According to a Globe and Mail article, the MP informed Trudeau that she would not be seeking re-election around the same time as Jody Wilson-Raybould’s resignation.

She allegedly told the PM that political life had seriously harmed her family life, and in response, according to Ms. Chavannes, the Prime Minister grew hostile and yelled at her. Specifically, he allegedly claimed that the MP did not appreciate him, especially when he had provided her with so much.

“He was yelling. He was yelling that I didn’t appreciate him, that he’d given me so much,” Caesar-Chavannes said.

A full week later, Caesar-Chavannes attempted to approach the PM again, and once more was met with “anger and hostility” before Mr. Trudeau allegedly stormed out of the room after staring her down, according to the Globe and Mail article.

Highlighting the cross-partisan importance behind Ms. Caesar-Chavannes public outcry, she finished her statements by noting that she did not drink “the Kool-Aid and then sign my name in blood to this party politics thing. Maybe politics is not for me because I clearly don’t follow what the handbook says I’m supposed to do,”

This Globe and Mail article follows a Tweet in which the MP publically called out the Prime Minister for his use of open leadership in speeches, while allegedly ignoring her.

[…]

Justin Trudeau himself has yet to publicly comment on the matter. In 2018, he famously said, “when women speak up, it is our duty to listen to them and to believe them.”

There’s something bigger at stake in the SNC-Lavalin affair than Trudeau’s career

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley explains why SNC-Lavalin is an example of Canada’s less-than-stellar record of holding corporations to account:

… University of Michigan law professor David Uhlmann argues in a 2016 paper, “criminal prosecution of corporations upholds the rule of law, validates the choices of law-abiding companies, and promotes accountability. … When corporations face no consequences for their criminal behavior, we minimize their lawlessness, and increase cynicism about the outsized influence of corporations.”

No kidding. And in a country like Canada, not to say a province like Quebec, it’s safe to say these lines of accountability and trust get severely tangled. Once a government deems any company “too big to fail,” whether it’s because of political donations or connections, or because its pension plan is heavily invested, or because it has acquired a creepy semi-sacred status among otherwise normal people — or indeed, because of an alleged 9,000 jobs — all these nice theories about the rule of law break down. That’s what we’ve been witnessing.

But there’s an even bigger breakdown going on that’s received far less attention. Employees allegedly behind Lavalin’s Libyan capers were criminally charged as well. Between them, former vice-president Sami Bebawi and former controller Stéphane Roy faced charges including defrauding the Libyan state, money laundering, violating UN sanctions, bribing Saadi Gadhafi — Moammar’s soccer-playing, Montreal-enjoying third son — and trying to extract him from Libya once it all kicked off in 2011.

Those charges were laid in February 2014. Last month, some against Bebawi and all against Roy were dismissed because the Crown didn’t manage to bring them to trial in five blessed years. In a scathing decision, judge Patricia Compagnone characterized the Crown’s behaviour as a perfect illustration of the “culture of complacency” and the “culture of delays” the Supreme Court had assailed in its landmark 2016 Jordan decision, which established empirical standards for the Charter right “to be tried within a reasonable time.”

It is an ever-more-curious mystery that Canada’s comprehensively screwed-up justice system never rises to the level of political crisis. In the first year after the Jordan decision alone, some 200 cases were thrown out on grounds of excessive delays. Some of the accused make the Friends of Moammar look like saints. They include alleged murderers, child molesters and drunk drivers.

The charges against SNC-Lavalin were laid in February 2015. More than four years later, we’re still fighting over whether to pursue them — and not, it must be said, in a way that makes us look like a terribly serious country. How nauseatingly fitting it would be if a court threw the case out before the feds even got a chance to decide what to do with it.

March 7, 2019

JWR should have reconsidered as many times as necessary to come to the “correct” decision, apparently

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Colby Cosh asks who is the one with memory issues — former Trudeau puppet-master Gerald Butts who resigned unexpectedly (but not at all for reasons related to the SNC-Lavalin affair, we’re told) or the minister who was relegated to the least important portfolio (in the view of the Trudeau government) in a totally unrelated cabinet shuffle after failing to fold under pressure?

On Wednesday, in testifying about the SNC-Lavalin scandal that has punched a hole in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, Gerald Butts left an impression of sincerity, or at least earnestness, and professed the best of intentions as Trudeau’s exiled principal secretary. Do you suppose it will help? The Liberal government’s SNC situation clearly has a traplike nature. Until the criminal charges against SNC-Lavalin are heard in a trial and resolved, or until they are abandoned, the thing will remain news, and Liberals will suffer.

The government’s line is that it was inappropriate for former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould to make a final commitment to leaving her Director of Public Prosecutions alone and to living with the decision not to enter a plea-bargaining process with SNC-Lavalin. Her successor in the office, David Lametti, will not make such a commitment now. We will never get the reassurance of hearing that the matter is closed. The professed view of cabinet, what’s left of it, is that it would be wrong to close it.

The government has tried to explain its belabouring of Wilson-Raybould as being perfectly appropriate. She was supposed to verrrry carefully consider the fate of 9,000 SNC-Lavalin jobs and a head office in Quebec, and then consider it again, and then consider it again. Butts tells us that they weren’t looking for a particular politically convenient answer, mind you.

They just stayed after her to keep reconsidering the answer she kept giving, explicitly or implicitly. They reassured her at every turn that the decision was hers. And then they got rid of her and made it someone else’s.

[…]

In theory, if you wanted to get rid of a truculent justice minister who won’t put a thumb on the scales of justice, offering her a job you know she will never, ever take seems like a good way to set about doing that. But this is just an unhappy coincidence, and we are not to draw inferences from it. I would conclude that “The Liberal government undoubtedly meant well,” but saying this sarcastically has, I am afraid, already become a Canadian cliché.

March 5, 2019

It’s almost as if we elected the actor, but really wanted the character he’d played on TV instead

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells calls Justin Trudeau an imposter:

… the problem for Trudeau — who came to power promising a new era of transparency — is that this phoniness is a trait he shows all too often.

In 2016, when the Globe and Mail reported that the Prime Minister had attended a Vancouver fundraiser attended by Chinese billionaires — one of whom promptly donated money to the private Montreal foundation named for Trudeau’s father — the Liberal Party of Canada said no government business is discussed at such events. Trudeau later admitted they asked about policy and he talked about jobs.

Legalizing cannabis is one of the signature achievements of this government. But Trudeau has never been able to say he did it so affluent consumers could more readily get high. Instead, he had everyone in his government swear the goal was to drain the black market and keep the stuff out of the hands of teenagers. Neither goal has come anywhere close to being reached. Judged by the standards of a bake-off for the children of privilege, legalization has been a great success. Judged by the standards the Prime Minister claims, it’s a mess. The operating assumption seems to be that we’re simply supposed to read between the lines — that we’ll understand that when Trudeau speaks he is not to be taken seriously.

[…]

I could keep picking examples of Trudeau acting one way and talking another (climate change, Indigenous reconciliation) until the cows come home. But at some point you’d say, with reason, that this is not exactly innovative behaviour for an elected politician. But what’s so damaging about the SNC-Lavalin affair is that, in private, there’s no evidence Trudeau governs as the future-looking sophisticate he plays on TV.

[…]

There’s a stack of assumptions behind that strategy as long as your arm: that SNC does work so good it could never be replaced, that a trial would wreck it, that a mere judge couldn’t possibly weigh the company’s social contribution in determining its legal liability. And the biggest assumption of them all is that all of this is so obvious, none of it needed explaining in two years of feverish PMO activity. Not to the attorney general — she got earfuls of explanation, delivered in shifts working overtime, for months after she made what Trudeau felt was the wrong decision. And not to you and me. Trudeau never thought you and I deserved to know why he was trying to keep SNC out of a trial court. This makes a mockery of a simple idea: the consent of the governed.

It turns out that behind the curtain, the wizard from the woke future of politics was indulging the oldest of old-fashioned industrial policy. Navdeep Bains, the so-called innovation minister, might as well legally change his name to C.D. Howe for all the innovation going on here.

As for Wilson-Raybould’s diversity of background and perspective, it turned out to be inconvenient. She didn’t buy into a cozy meeting of minds along the Toronto-to-Montreal corridor. And the meeting of minds was what really mattered. Because it’s 2019.

The day got worse for Trudeau, as another cabinet minister resigned rather than stick around for the deck chairs to start floating away:

March 3, 2019

Yet another “adventure” in modern architecture

Filed under: Architecture, Cancon, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Thread reader can’t piece together unrelated-by-Twitter-standards tweets, so here’s the rest of that thread in one go:

We need more data on the SNC-Lavalin affair

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Coyne insists the whole story must come out before we call in the RCMP:

Where do we go from here? It is important not to get ahead of ourselves. Opposition calls for the prime minister to resign over the SNC-Lavalin affair, or for the RCMP to investigate, are premature at this point. However compelling Wednesday’s testimony before the Commons justice committee by the former minister of justice and attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, may have been, all of the facts are not in.

It is still open to the government to provide those missing facts, and still possible to hope they may prove exculpatory. That they have done their level best so far to provide none, alas, strongly suggests the contrary. Even in response to Wilson-Raybould’s detailed, documented account of the many and sustained ways in which he and officials in his government attempted to interfere with a criminal prosecution, to the point not only of threatening her job but, it would seem, of carrying out the threat, the best that Justin Trudeau could offer was that he “disagreed” with it.

The prime minister prevented Wilson-Raybould from speaking for as long as he dared, and is still insisting she may not discuss potentially significant conversations with him and his cabinet after she was shuffled out of Justice. The prime minister’s former principal secretary, Gerry Butts, has agreed to testify before the committee, but no current employee of the prime minister’s office has yet been called, nor have any of the others Wilson-Raybould identified as having pressured her to go easy on SNC-Lavalin, save the clerk of the privy council, Michael Wernick.

Demands for a public inquiry, then, or at least for all of the relevant witnesses to be called before the committee, are closer to the mark. Whatever the prime minister and his people may or may not be guilty of, they cannot be allowed to get away with this blatant stonewalling. So, too, the Conservative and NDP leaders were justified in calling for Parliament to continue to sit next week, rather than take the next two weeks off. Indeed, they would be within their rights to hold up all parliamentary business, including the budget, until they get satisfaction. It is that important.

March 2, 2019

Mark Steyn – Trudeaupia on the Waterfront

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn on the “nothing to see here, let’s just move on” SNC-Lavalin affair:

Speaking as someone who gets sued a lot, I account Jody Wilson-Raybould as a killer exemplar of what every litigant dreads the other side coming up with – a credible witness. In a riveting performance, the former Attorney General of Canada laid out calmly and without overheated rhetorical flourish a campaign by the most powerful figures in the government to get their cronies at SNC-Lavalin off the hook of a criminal prosecution for bribing (Libyan) government officials. Ms Wilson-Raybould identified just shy of a dozen Liberal Party bruisers who leaned on her, including the most senior chaps in the Prime Minister’s Office, the Privy Council Office and the Ministry of Finance – and ultimately the PM himself.

But, in a competitive field, perhaps the behavior of Michael Wernick, Clerk of the Privy Council, a career civil servant and the highest-ranking in Canada, is the most outrageous. In a three-man meeting – the Clerk, the Attorney General and the PM – Mr Wernick acted not as an impartial public servant but as a gung-ho party hack demanding political interference in a criminal prosecution in order to help Justin’s pals beat the rap:

    The PM again cited potential loss of jobs and SNC moving. Then to my surprise – the Clerk started to make the case for the need to have a DPA – he said “there is a board meeting on Thursday (Sept 20) with stock holders” … “they will likely be moving to London if this happens”… “and there is an election in Quebec soon”…

    At that point the PM jumped in stressing that there is an election in Quebec and that “and I am an MP in Quebec – the member for Papineau”.

    I was quite taken aback. My response – and I remember this vividly – was to ask the PM a direct question while looking him in the eye – I asked: “Are you politically interfering with my role / my decision as the AG? I would strongly advise against it.” The Prime Minister said “No, No, No – we just need to find a solution.”

When Ms Wilson-Raybould held firm against Justin’s pressure to lean on the Crown’s prosecution of a serious criminal case, he arranged a Cabinet reshuffle to remove her as Attorney General.

This is a protection racket: Underneath the LGBTQWERTY Ramadan socks and the Bollywood bridesmaid outfits for his passage through India, Justin Trudeau turns out to be Lee J Cobb in On the Waterfront. My old friend Paul Wells calls this a “moral catastrophe” for Justin. Not quite: He is who he is. It’s a moral catastrophe for Canada if those who dote on the Dauphin make the rest of us go along with it.

February 28, 2019

The federal Liberals did get one important thing right … no, not marijuana legalization

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals haven’t had a lot of successes in their term in office, but there is one achievement they can legitimately take some credit for:

Pssst. Can I let you in on a little secret? Keep it under your hat, but — the poverty rate has fallen again. In fact, it’s at a new all-time low. Statistics Canada reports that the percentage of Canadians falling below the official poverty line in 2017 fell to 9.5 per cent, down from 15.6 per cent in 2006. That still leaves much room for improvement. But this is remarkable progress.

Of course, the official measure of poverty, known as the Market Basket Measure, has only been around for a few years. But an earlier, unofficial measure, known as the Low Income Cut Off, goes back much further. It, too, is at an all-time low, after a steady, two decades-long decline. Indeed, at 7.8 per cent, it’s barely half what it was in 1996.

Andrew Coyne continues:

The sources of this amazing success story are not hard to find — and no, it is not quite as simple a matter as replacing the Conservatives with the Liberals. The trendlines on both low and median incomes, I repeat, go back to the mid-1990s: when the economy, after the long recession, began to grow again.

It turns out — who knew — that poverty tends to fall, and incomes to rise, in periods of economic growth, such as we have enjoyed, almost without interruption, since then. Even the 2009 recession, a relatively mild one in Canada, barely made a dent in either trend.

Still, the Liberals deserve some credit for the continuing decline in poverty since they were elected. If the overall rate has dropped appreciably, it has fallen even more among children — especially welcome, given the lasting effects poverty can have on life chances. At nine per cent, it is down a third from just two years ago.

That’s almost certainly due, at least in part, to the Liberals’ first and most significant policy reform: the rationalization of several existing child benefits and credits into a single income-tested Canada Child Benefit, with increased amounts going to low-income families. It turns out — who knew — that if you give people more money, they are less likely to be in poverty.

February 27, 2019

Toronto’s transit cheat epidemic

Filed under: Business, Cancon — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I knew the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) had an issue with fare evasion, but I had no idea it was as prevalent as this:

Anyone who has ever sat through a Toronto Transportation Commission meeting has likely heard anecdotal evidence that fare evasion on the transit system is utterly rampant, if not a mockery of Western civilization itself. Traditionally, such people tended to be treated as harmless cranks. TTC staff would placate them with various internal audits conducted over the years that found roughly two-per-cent fare loss. As recently as 2017, the TTC was claiming just 1.8 per cent of passengers on streetcars — where it’s easiest not to pay — weren’t ponying up.

Well, so much for that. In a convincing report issued last week based on 136 hours of in-person observation and 38 hours of security footage, city auditor-general Beverly Romeo-Beehler estimates fare evasion rates at 15.2 per cent on streetcars, 5.1 per cent on buses and 3.7 per cent on subways, for a total weighted average of 5.4 per cent— around $61 million a year, plus roughly $3.4 million thanks to malfunctioning Presto card equipment owned by Metrolinx.

To put that in perspective, last year’s average 3.2-per-cent fare increase was projected to add $17 million to TTC coffers. If the AG is right, commuters are paying something like 12 cents per trip to subsidize free riders. And the problems underlying the issue are nothing short of jaw-dropping. For one thing, the auditor-general’s team observed scores of adults — and precisely zero children — using child Presto cards to ride for free.

Transgender athletes

Filed under: Cancon, Politics, Sports — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Barbara Kay explains why she is against allowing transgender athletes to compete with cisgendered women:

Sport is one area where the community­ will resist “social justice” initiatives if they conflict with sport’s bedrock principles of a level playing field and zero tolerance for cheating. Up until about five minutes ago in the long history of sport, that meant women competed against women and men competed against men in all sports where advantage lies in size, power and/or speed.

When a biologically male runner or cyclist who ranks as middle of the pack in men’s races becomes the gold medallist in a Women’s race, he cheats the silver and bronze women athletes beside him on the podium, and especially the woman who came in fourth. But he also cheats people who came out to see a clean race. Joe and Jane Public know unfairness and reality denial when they see it, and it sucks all the joy out of the word “competition” for them.

[…]

Athlete Ally is one of a constellation of LGBT advocacy groups that “are helping sport organizations in Canada become more inclusive.” This quotation is taken from the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport’s most recent policy paper, “Creating Inclusive environments for Trans Participants in Canadian Sport.” Designed as a policy guidance tool for sport organizations, it was developed by the ‘Trans Inclusion in Sport Expert Working Group,’ which I will hereafter refer to as the EWG. If you want to get a flavour of the kind of anti-science Kool-Aid our sports brain trust is drinking, read this document.

It begins factually enough. The paper notes that the vast majority of sport participation in Canada is focused on recreation and development. At this level, trans inclusion is not a big deal, because it’s all about fun and skill building. It is only for the “very small minority” of Canadian athletes who continue into high performance that competitive advantage becomes an issue. Enter the EWG. And here we leave facts behind and enter La La Land.

Sex, the EWG says, “is usually assigned at birth.” No. Sex is established during gestation according to chromosomal development. Sex is observed at birth, not assigned. Gender, the EWG says, “is not inherently connected to one’s physical anatomy.” No. Sex and gender are connected for 99% of humanity, and therefore “inherent” by normal metrics.

The definition of the word “trans,” for sports purposes, according to the EWG, “includes but is not limited to people who identify as transgender, transsexual, cross dressers (adjective) or gender non-conforming (gender diverse or genderqueer).” This is quite a puzzling mashup. Cross-dressing males do not believe they “are” female. Neither do non-conforming males and females who have no wish to transition.

But the document does not address this important inconsistency, nor the alarming imprecision of “not limited to.” From what they state in this definition, EWG is okay with cross-sex competing by biological males who do not believe they are females and females who do not believe they are male, but whose appearance or fetishes are atypical for their sex. We’re off to a very confusing start. Things don’t improve.

Indeed, to be trans can mean almost anything an individual wants it to mean (“not limited to…”), according to this document: “It is important for sports organizations to understand that each individual is different. There is no single transition process and each person will make different choices,” including, significantly, “whether they undertake hormonal or surgical transitions.”

And “[a]n individuals’ personal choice to not use hormones does not make them any less trans nor do these choices change their right to be recognized as the gender with which they identify — man, woman, both or other.” In short, the definition of trans, to be accepted by official governing sports bodies, is left entirely to an individual’s “sense” of gender identity, completely untethered from biology.

February 26, 2019

“The SNC-Lavalin affair is the quintessential Canadian controversy”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Conrad Black on the ongoing SNC-Lavalin scandal:

The SNC-Lavalin affair is the quintessential Canadian controversy. It is alleged by unnamed sources that the former justice minister and attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, was pressured to order her officials to assess fines rather than prosecute executives for financial crimes in the matter of SNC-Lavalin’s methods in seeking certain construction contracts in Libya, not a country where the Better Business Bureau rules commerce with an iron fist. At a later date, Ms. Wilson-Raybould consented to be moved to the position of associate minister of national defence and minister of veterans’ affairs, generally considered a demotion. When rumours circulated in the media about the propriety of allowing the company to pay fines rather than prosecute some of its executives, the prime minister defended the government, denied the rumours, and stated that the minister’s continued presence in the government was proof that the rumours were unfounded. The minister then resigned, but has since attended a full caucus meeting and had a calming effect on the Liberal MPs. She has said nothing publicly because of the delicacy of lawyer/client privilege opposite the prime minister, who has declined to waive the privilege. This is, in fact, bunk. The prime minister was not the client of the minister of justice in the SNC-Lavalin affair, and the prime minister doesn’t have any standing to waive anything on this subject, and his invocation of cabinet secrecy is twaddle, especially after the subject was aired before the entire Liberal caucus.

All government spokespeople deny any official misconduct or impropriety but the principal secretary and chief strategist of the regime, Gerald Butts, resigned, with the novel explanation that although nothing inappropriate had occurred, he thought the air should be cleared, so he walked the plank. This is the point at which this supposed scandal becomes uniquely Canadian. A minister belatedly resigns but informally continues to attend cabinet and expatiate on this issue and the government reinforces its protestations of absolute innocence of wrongdoing by the prime minister accepting the abrupt resignation of the most influential non-elected person in the government (and he also had a great deal more influence than almost all the elected ministers and MP’s).

I invite any reader to cite another country where a minister would consent to be shuffled down, maintain a complete silence while her father, an indigenous leader, has conducted an entertaining non-stop press conference denouncing the “white man’s justice,” although he has clearly gamed the system pretty well for himself, and the head of the prime minister’s office and closest collaborator of the prime minister resigns while proclaiming that nothing improper has been done and that he is only sacrificing himself to satiate the false accusers. This is too innocuous for the Americans and major European countries, too wholesome for Latin America, too complicated for the Swiss and Scandinavians, too discrete for Australia, and small potatoes for the Japanese. This is Canada, the land of Dudley Do-Right, and before him, of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald singing Rose-Marie in the Rockies. The story line of this scandal is absurd, but in its way, magnificently Canadian.

February 25, 2019

HMCS Bonaventure of the Royal Canadian Navy

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Sneaky Loon
Published on 9 Apr 2017

The Bonaventure was purchased from the Royal Navy to replace HMCS Magnificent because the Bonaventure could operate fighter jets to conduct anti-submarine activities.

February 22, 2019

The odd dual role of the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh provides an interesting tidbit of Canadian constitutional detail in the SNC-Lavalin affair:

As a minister she can be expected, and will have expected, to sometimes be given advice and orders from the PM. It would not be an unusual feature of her job to have one of the PM’s close advisers visit her with delegated instructions. Maybe sometimes those instructions would be delivered somewhat abruptly. It happens.

But. The minister of justice also bears an associated title: she is also the attorney general of Canada. You may have gotten the idea that this is just a matter of tradition, a romantic holdover from olden times. It is in fact a matter of explicit statute, the Department of Justice Act, as well as an important constitutional concept. The minister of justice is a politician who writes legislation and oversees the operation of law and courts. The attorney general, although always and necessarily the same human as the minister of justice, is a distinct person charged with the royal authority to commence, manage and cancel criminal prosecutions. When someone sues the Crown it is normally the attorney general who answers, and when the Crown sues it is done through her.

What does this mean? It means that if you are the prime minister’s trusted old chum who does his dirty work, it is all right for you to visit a mere minister of justice, operating in that capacity, and to tell her what the boss wants done for crude partisan reasons. But it is quite strictly forbidden to do that to an attorney general.

In matters of hiring or statute-writing, you can go ahead, kick down her door, and tell her “Orillia needs more red-headed Hungarian judges!” or “There really oughta be a law against candy.” When it comes to prosecutions — when madame has her attorney general hat on — it is very different. You, as a sunny-ways enforcer, are not even supposed to provide unsolicited advice or hints from the prime minister. The PM may be the minister of justice’s boss, but he is not in the chain of command between the attorney general and the sovereign at all.

An attorney general is supposed to make prosecution decisions with the good of the country in mind, and she can ask ministers for their opinions about what would be good, just as she could consult any other schmuck. But for a PM or his dogsbody to venture such an opinion spontaneously, whatever the motive, is not cool. If someone tried to give an attorney general such advice, and she told that person to shove off back to Cape Breton in a leaky dory, and she woke up one morning not long after and turned on the radio and heard that she was no longer attorney general, that would certainly be a mighty big deal.

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